Police must stop these deadly car pursuits

Earlier this week yet another pedestrian was killed by a police car involved in a chase. The victim was a 29-year-old woman whose only crime was to venture on to the mean streets of south London without a car of her own. We don't know, as yet, whether the burglars the police were pursuing got away, but even if they were caught and are now languishing in the cells, it doesn't make her death one jot less obscene.

The facts are these: since 1997/98 there has been a six-fold increase in deaths resulting from police car chases, and last year there was a total of 44. These statistics come from a report written for the Police Complaints Authority itself, and are described by its author, Dr David Best, as an "alarming trend". His key conclusion is self-evident, namely that the police are engaging in too many pursuits that endanger public safety. Dr Best suggests that officers who continue to chase cars without giving a risk assessment to their control rooms should face disciplinary measures. Personally, I find it astonishing that this is not already the case.

Further recommendations are that chases involving convoys of police vehicles and unmarked cars should be stopped. As I live in the epicentre of Lambeth's gun-crime zone, I'm never more than a few minutes away from the sound of an emergency vehicle of one kind or another.

We've all seen the grotesque scenes that ensue after a patrol car has carved its way through a traffic jam. Often some boy racer who fancies himself a wolf among urban sheep will try to follow in its wake, or a quite innocent driver who's pulled over to assist the police will pull out again too quickly and be hit by the next speeding police car in the convoy.

Since, by definition, once a police chase is under way the crime has already happened, the only possible conclusion is that the role hot pursuit plays in law enforcement is primarily psychological. I don't mean by this that it acts as a deterrent for the criminals, because being chased is all part of the adrenaline rush for serious offenders - it's being caught they cannot abide. No, it's the police themselves who need the car chase.

Let's face it, the vast majority of police work is emotionally harrowing, incredibly exhausting and even downright boring; like being a cross between a social worker, a filing clerk, and a train spotter. Without the lure of high-speed crime-hunting it would be still harder to attract recruits than it already is.

If the Met wants to continue to win the respect of Londoners for the vital work they do, they must end these deathly pursuits. But by the same token, if we want our police officers to rely on intelligence work to catch criminals, we must be prepared to pay the wages required by intelligent workers rather than Dirty Harrys.

James Bond, accountant?

With the collapse of WorldCom coming hard on the heels of the Enron implosion, and the revelation that both companies were audited by Andersen Accounting, the most painful of conclusions has become inescapable: accountancy is not boring.

Some analysts are now predicting that the WorldCom collapse will have a greater impact on the world economy than the attacks on the World Trade Center. Just fancy that! It turns out that a gang of grey suits wielding Biros, calculators and shredding machines are more deadly than whole plane-loads of murderous, nihilistic fanatics.

Presumably, we can look forward to the new ?interesting? status of accountancy being reflected in our popular culture. I keenly anticipate a James Bond extravaganza, in which Pierce Brosnan saves the West from a renegade, cat-stroking, chartered accountant, who threatens to destroy Her Majesty?s Secret Service by forcing M to disclose exactly what proportion of agents? car travel was for business purposes.

Enough of this Burberry madness

The Burberry check is a particularly hideous kind of pseudo-tartan, which used to be confined - quite rightly - to the linings of the Macintoshes of obese American tourists. Unfortunately, in the past few years, it's broken out from this foetid ghetto and spread all over everything, like a vile beige, red, white and black rash.

A couple of years ago it was seen entirely covering Madonna and Kate Moss but they - unlike the low-rent fashion victims you see wandering down your high street - could afford to get treatment. Earlier this week Burberry prepared to float on the stock exchange with an anticipated price of £1.45 billion, and while the company's revenue doesn't come exclusively from this fabric blight, perhaps once the mass of worms turn and shed their beige skins, the new investors will see their shares plummet.

The ensuing Burberry collapse will, I earnestly hope , match WorldCom and Enron for scale. But rather than being an example of gross corporate fraud, in this case the investors will have only their own awful taste to blame.

If you can't beat them ...

In a sketch in which he plays the headmaster of a trendy coed school, Peter Sellers is asked by the parents of a prospective pupil how he separates the sexes. "If necessary," he replies, "I prise them apart with a crowbar." Figures released this week that show Britain retains its shameful status as the European country with the highest rate of teenage pregnancy, have provoked the usual stereotypical responses. In the right-hand corner are those who would prise apart the sexes with a crowbar, and then use it to give them a sound thrashing; while in the left-hand corner are those who would give them a copy of the Joy of Sex and a liberal supply of condoms.

However, neither group seems to be in dispute about the salient point at issue here, which is that young men can't help being priapic, just as young women cannot but be receptive. The British upper-middle classes of the Victorian era had the solution to this dilemma. By confining boys to same-sex boarding schools throughout puberty and adolescence they greatly increased their offspring's propensity for homosexual relationships. Now, try as he might, a young lad can't get his best mate pregnant, and a robust liking for the pleasures offered by your own gender, whether social or sexual, is a fine preparation for the future.

Would those great institutions, the Church of England, the Army and the Foreign Office have been nearly as effective as they were in the last century, without the "old boy" network? And cannot the decline of British society be more or less dated from the point where rabid coeducationalism began to force young people of the opposite sex into an unsavoury proximity with one another?